Can Fear Win Undecided Voters? Psychologists Say Maybe Not

By BENEDICT CAREY

Published: October 5, 2004

For all the policy differences it revealed, the presidential debate last week also highlighted what has become a predominant theme in this presidential campaign: fear.

President Bush implied that Senator John Kerry's ''mixed message'' on Iraq would only encourage the enemy. Mr. Kerry warned that Mr. Bush's ''certainty'' could needlessly extend a bloody occupation.

Each side hopes that fear of a future shaped by the opposing candidate will help win over undecided voters.

Yet psychologists who study the effect of emotion on voting behavior say that undecided voters are the least likely to respond to fear as a persuasion tactic.

In fact, new research suggests that it is the politically informed partisan voter who is most susceptible to persuasion by fear and anxiety. Voters who are truly undecided, many political scientists argue, are not so much torn between the candidates as tuned out, and they do not feel strongly enough about issues to be swayed by threatening messages.

''If the campaigns want to shake out more support, win over these voters, fear is one way they can do to it,'' said Dr. Ted Brader, a University of Michigan political scientist who studies political advertisements, ''but the dollars may be better spent on ads that rally support among their own base.''

Although campaign consultants have long known that scare tactics can win votes, it is only recently that psychologists and political scientists have devised studies to find out whose votes they win, and why. Some researchers have sifted through nationwide polling data, before and after elections, looking for relationships between anxiety levels and changes in voting behavior.

Others have conducted experiments comparing the effects of commercials not only on people's opinions but on how they actually engage political issues and assess candidates. The study of emotion, said Dr. Arthur Lupia of the University of Michigan, ''has become all the rage in political science.''

In studies, Dr. Brader and other researchers have found that advertisements using fear worked best among the ''sophisticated'' voters, who surveys showed tended to be partisan and well informed.

''The conventional wisdom is that politicians use these kinds of ads to prey on the uninformed masses,'' Dr. Brader said. ''I found that that could not be less true.''

In one study, accepted for publication by The American Journal of Political Science, Dr. Brader tested the effect of a variety of campaign advertisements on 286 Massachusetts voters during a recent campaign for governor. They represented a cross section of the state's voters, and they viewed the political spots as they would at home, during commercial breaks in other shows.

The advertisements were clearly partisan, intended to stir anxiety about issues like crime and education, in some cases by stating that things were bad, in others by adding to the same message ominous music and grainy images intended to stir fear.

Dr. Brader found that among sophisticated voters who viewed the threatening advertisements, about 26 percent said they would change their votes in favor of the candidate promoted in the commercial. (Another 8 percent or so said they would switch their votes in the opposite direction.)

Among less savvy voters, only 13 percent said they would change their votes to favor the advertised candidate (13 percent switched their vote the other way). Sophisticated voters who saw the fear-based ads were also more likely than less informed voters to read about the issues raised.

Dr. Brader cautioned that the large percentage of voters who changed sides partly reflected the isolated conditions of the lab; in the real world, where people see streams of conflicting messages, the effect was likely to be more muted. Still, in another just-completed study of advertisements on immigration, Dr. Brader and a colleague, Dr. Nicholas Valentino, found a similar effect.

Fear campaigns are as old as democracy, but they came of age in the postwar era of mass media advertising. In the famous ''daisy'' advertisement, used by President Lyndon B. Johnson against Barry Goldwater in 1964, images of a girl picking petals from a flower dissolved into a nuclear explosion.

Twenty years later, in the classic ''bear'' ad promoting President Ronald Reagan, a bear made its way through a field toward a lone person, while a narrator warned: ''Some people say the bear is tame. Others say it's vicious and dangerous. Since we can never really be sure who's right, isn't it smart to be as strong as the bear?''

Perhaps the most infamous use of fear was a 1988 advertisement used to attack Gov. Michael Dukakis, the Democratic nominee. It showed a mug shot of a convicted murderer, Willie Horton, who attacked a couple while he was on prison furlough in Massachusetts, Mr. Dukakis's home state.

Since then, both Democrats and Republicans have run campaigns intended to scare Americans into thinking that their health care benefits were under siege by meddling socialists or greedy capitalists.

In the current campaign, waged at a time of terror abroad and government warnings at home, security threats, blending death and uncertainty, create a receptive audience for fear-based messages.

Unconscious reminders of death can prompt anger, and a subtle hardening of political views, studies have found.